JERUSALEM — One suspect took 10 years to complete a college degree in Shariah law, according to relatives, because his studies kept being interrupted by stints in Israeli prison. The other quit school at 13, has been in poor health since a swimming accident put him in a coma in 2007, and has worked as a blacksmith, a porter, and a clothes salesman, several people who know him said.

The two Palestinian men, Israel’s prime suspects in the June 12 kidnapping and killing of three teenagers, live perhaps 500 yards apart in Hebron, the West Bank’s largest city, and pray together dawn and dusk in a neighborhood mosque. Amer Abu Aisha, 33, the swimmer, frequented the barbershop owned by Marwan Qawasmeh, 29, the college graduate, who learned to cut hair in prison and was unable to get a job as an imam — in part, an uncle said, because of “his political affiliation.”

“They are familiar with Hamas, everybody knows they support Hamas, but I can’t say they are officially part of the Hamas military wing,” said Shlomi Eldar, whose 2011 book, “Getting to Know Hamas,” includes material about members of the Qawasmeh family carrying out 13 suicide bombings in the second Palestinian intifada. “I’m sure they didn’t get any green light from the leadership of Hamas, they just thought it was the right time to act.”

A day after the grisly discovery of the teenagers’ bodies buried under rocks in an open field, Israeli security forces turned their full attention Tuesday to searching for the suspects, who relatives and neighbors said have not been seen since the abduction. As Israel’s cabinet and the Palestinian leadership met late into Tuesday night to consider response to the killings, militants in the Gaza Strip once again lobbed rockets toward Israel, continuing an escalation in which Israel pummeled a Hamas compound in southern Gaza with 34 bombs in the early morning.

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Israeli’s Call to Police Hotline

Gilad Shaar, one of the three kidnapped Israeli teenagers whose bodies were found Monday, managed to make a cellphone call to a police emergency number.

“Anyone who thinks that they can achieve anything by using terrorism against us will continue to be mistaken and will achieve the opposite results,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters before the cabinet convened. “We will neither rest nor slacken until we reach the last of them, and it does not matter where they try to hide.”

The deteriorating situation came as tens of thousands of Israelis thronged to individual funeral services for the murdered teenagers — Naftali Fraenkel and Gilad Shaar, both 16, and Eyal Yifrach, 19 — and then to their side-by-side burial, wrapped in Israeli flags, in the city of Modiin. Having become unifying national symbols, they were eulogized, like heroes and statesmen, by Mr. Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres and Israel’s chief rabbis, as well as by family members.

“God’s ways are mysterious, and I don’t know why you have left us so young,” Naftali’s father, Avi, said at his son’s service in the religious kibbutz Shaalvim. “But your death has led this entire nation forward, and there is some comfort.”

The teenagers were last seen about 10:15 p.m. on June 12 as they tried to hitchhike home from their yeshivas in West Bank settlements. The authorities believe they were killed shortly after climbing into a Hyundai i35 that had been stolen from central Israel a month earlier, perhaps even as Gilad managed, at 10:25 p.m., to make a cellphone call to a police hotline.

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The West Bank home of a kidnapping suspect, Amer Abu Aisha, was destroyed by Israeli forces.Credit
Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images

The two-minute call — broadcast on Israeli television and radio Tuesday after an order on its contents was lifted — was considered a prank by the police, delaying the start of the search. On the recording, Gilad says calmly and quietly in Hebrew, “I’ve been kidnapped,” then one of his captors says — also in Hebrew — “Head down!” and, in Arabic, orders him to hand over the phone.

There are then what sound like gunshots, and a painful groan, before a police operator repeatedly asks, “Hello?” and then, “Where are you?”

The first significant clue, a spokesman for the Israel Police said, was found the next morning: In the burned-out hull of the Hyundai was a pair of tefillin, the leather-bound texts that religious Jews like these youths strap on for prayers. DNA evidence from the car, which had been left in Hebron suburb of Dura, not far from the hitchhiking post, was quickly matched to their parents.

After nearly two weeks combing caves and cisterns, another break came Thursday, when searchers found a sandal that looked like one of the boys’, the police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld said. Then, just before 1 a.m. Sunday, the police brought a pair of spectacles found in the field to an eyeglasses store, where the owner, Shalom Friedman, confirmed that he had sold them to Mr. Yifrach.

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Tens of thousands gathered for a joint funeral in Modiin.Credit
Ariel Schalit/Associated Press

The eyeglasses were “completely smashed,” Mr. Friedman said in a video interview posted on Tuesday on the Israeli news site Ynet. “It was a chilling moment.”

Finally, on Monday at about 5 p.m., amid agricultural lands worked by the Qawasmeh family, search teams including volunteer hiking guides removed a bush that looked out of place, and then a pile of stones, and then three bodies, whose identities were confirmed by forensics about 3 a.m. Tuesday.

“It was kind of a puzzle,” said a senior Israeli security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to do otherwise. “There was no one golden piece of information.”

“It’s a huge area,” he added. “Not hard to hide people there. Every day, the search area got narrowed down.”

The Israeli Teenagers

The yeshiva students disappeared on June 12 while hitchhiking in the West Bank.

Eyal Yifrach, 19, was from Elad, an ultra-Orthodox town in central Israel.

Yitzhak Daboul, a friend of Eyal's family, told the Israeli news website Ynet that Eyal was “the father of all kids in the neighborhood,” who always did the right thing.

According to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, Eyal, who had been in a pre-military program, began studying at the Shavei Hevron yeshiva less than two months after a friend who studied there died in car accident.

His mother, Rachel said Naftali, the second of seven children, loved playing basketball and the guitar, fought with his sisters and had a “cynical sense of humor.”

His maternal grandparents emigrated to Israel from New York in the 1950s, and he held joint Israeli and American citizenship.

According to Israel's Channel 10 Nana website, Naftali and Gilad Shaar recently returned from a two-day class trip in which they participated in a human-pyramid contest and won first prize.

Gilad Shaar, 16, is from the settlement of Talmon in the central West Bank.

He was a leader in Bnei Akiva, a popular religious youth movement, and his friends and family said he was an avid baker.

According to Ynet, Gilad’s great-uncle was killed fighting in the 1982 war with Lebanon, and though his family wanted Gilad to buried in a military cemetery, their request was denied.

Almost from the start, Israel sought to pin the abduction on Hamas, whose reconciliation deal with the Palestine Liberation Organization it vigorously opposes. During the 18-day operation in the West Bank, according to a military statement, Israeli soldiers arrested 419 Palestinians — 335 of them affiliated with Hamas — searched 2,218 locations and confiscated about $350,000. They also killed six Palestinians who confronted them, the latest a wanted man who threw a grenade as they approached Tuesday morning in Jenin.

Hamas leaders have praised the kidnapping but not claimed credit for it.

“The whole issue of who did this, we don’t know, really, even though Israel managed to punish everybody,” said Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the P.L.O. executive committee. “Hamas has never been self-effacing. Whenever they carried out an operation, they always declared it and took responsibility.”

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The Israeli authorities acknowledge that the Mr. Qawasmeh and Mr. Aisha might have been a rogue cell operating without orders from the Hamas leadership. Mr. Qawasmeh, who five years ago told a fellow prisoner he had tried to kidnap an Israeli settler, is part of one of Hebron’s three largest families, a clan of 10,000 people associated with the militant Islamic Hamas movement but also known to buck its leadership, according to Mr. Eldar, the author. Inside the home of Mr. Aisha, a large Hamas poster mourns a brother who was killed by Israeli soldiers in 2005 as he tried to attack them.

“We are still trying to understand if they worked alone or had connections abroad or in Gaza,” the senior security official said of the suspects. “But the agenda of kidnapping is central to Hamas.”

In Hebron, where Israeli troops demolished the apartments of Mr. Qawasmeh and Mr. Aisha hours after the bodies were found, relatives and friends described the suspects as devoutly religious men with deep grudges against Israel. Mr. Qawasmeh has been arrested by Israel five times, the first at age 18, and Mr. Aisha twice.

“He was against the national unity government, against the Oslo Accords, against Jews who occupied Palestine,” said Bassam Qawasmeh, 51, an uncle, referring to the Palestinian government sworn in last month based on the reconciliation with Hamas, and to the accords signed with Israel in the 1990s. “His goal, like every Palestinian, is to liberate all of Palestine.”

Mr. Aisha’s relatives denied he was a member of Hamas. “A person like him couldn’t be a kidnapper,” said a cousin, Tahseen Abu Aisha, 51, who was one of several who said the swimming accident left him thin and weak. Another cousin, Abdel Rahman, 24, said, “He is just a Muslim who prays in a mosque.”

Jodi Rudoren reported from Jerusalem, and Said Ghazali from Hebron and Azariya, West Bank. Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Shalvim and Modiiin, Israel, and Nayef Hashlamoun from Hebron.

A version of this article appears in print on July 2, 2014, on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: A Trail of Clues Leading to Victims and Heartbreak. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe